Paprec Brand Guidelines: A La Courneuve Paper Recycler, Sixty Takeovers & an IMOCA

A small paper and cardboard recycler in Seine-Saint-Denis.

Paprec’s story, as the company tells it, starts in 1994 in La Courneuve, in Seine-Saint-Denis on the northern edge of Paris. That year Jean-Luc Petithuguenin, a senior executive in the recycling and industrial cleaning arm of the Compagnie Générale des Eaux, the group now called Veolia, took over Paprec, a small local business that recycled paper and cardboard. The company’s history page says it then had 45 employees and one factory. French Wikipedia says he bought it from the Générale des Eaux group, and that paper recycling, its original trade, is where the name comes from. The company describes him as its founder.

From paper the business moved into other materials. French Wikipedia lists plastics, ordinary industrial waste, building-site waste, wood and metals among the areas it added, and the company’s own history page adds green waste, confidential documents and electrical and electronic waste. The company says it has made about sixty acquisitions and that organic growth accounts for two thirds of its development.

Outside investors came and went while the founder kept control. According to French Wikipedia, the banks Crédit Agricole (from 2000) and Société Générale (from 2003) gave way in 2006 to BNP Paribas, the Caisse des dépôts and Banque Populaire; in 2008 Financière Agache, with Rothschild & Co and the Quilvest fund, took a minority stake; and in 2012 the French state fund FSI took 25 per cent while the founder raised his holding to 65 per cent. By 2017, French Wikipedia says, the family held 70 per cent and Bpifrance the rest, and in 2023 Vauban Infrastructure Partners and Crédit Agricole joined the shareholders. French Wikipedia also says Paprec was among the first French companies to issue green bonds, in 2015.

Collection, sorting, energy and Spain.

Acquisitions shaped the map. French Wikipedia records the purchase of Interseroh France, renamed CDI Recyclage, and of the Swiss Lottner group in 2010, its first move abroad; the metal recycler Desplat in 2014; and Coved, the waste arm of Saur, announced in December 2016, which the company’s brands page says focuses on public authorities, from household collection to storage and sorting. In 2021 it bought Dalkia Wastenergy, formerly Tiru, adding energy-from-waste plants, and English Wikipedia says a dedicated Paprec Énergies entity followed in 2022, covering energy recovery and anaerobic digestion.

Spain became its second market. English Wikipedia says three small Spanish companies came first, followed by a 60 per cent stake in the Catalan firm GBi Serveis and, in 2023, CLD, which handles a large part of Barcelona’s waste collection and runs five sorting centres.

The company’s own figures are large. Its “Paprec in brief” page gives 16 million tonnes collected and 16,000 employees, and calls the group the French number one in recycling and the third-largest waste treatment company in France. BFM TV, reporting in February 2025, also ranked Paprec third in French waste treatment and energy recovery, behind Veolia and Suez, and first in recycling.

Many of its businesses still trade under their own names. The company’s brands page describes the group as “like a fleet of ships all sailing towards the same destination” and lists, among others, CDI Recyclage for paper, cardboard and plastic; Confidentialys for secure document destruction; Paprec Coved for local authorities; and FCR, which sells the recycled raw materials the group produces, nearly five million tonnes a year, the page says.

Its home base stayed in Seine-Saint-Denis. English Wikipedia says new premises opened on the historic La Courneuve site in June 2019, after 18 months of building work, and that the founder’s sons, Sébastien and Mathieu, took the posts of chief executive and general manager later that year.

How waste firms present themselves.

Waste and recycling companies rarely sell a product people choose off a shelf. Their identity is carried instead by the things the public sees every week: collection vehicles, bins, depots and, increasingly, large plants on the edge of town. Some of those marks have long histories. English Wikipedia records that the London firm Cory gave its colliers a black funnel with a white band and a black diamond, flew a red house flag with a cream diamond, and later painted its road haulage vehicles white with the same black lozenge.

On their own websites, the companies in this guide arrange themselves around services rather than products: collection, recycling and energy recovery, each with its own page. Viridor’s site leads with energy from waste, decarbonisation and what it calls Circular Solutions; Cory’s explains, step by step, how a black bag travels from a riverside transfer station by barge to its Riverside plant at Belvedere, and how ash from the process becomes aggregate. Those pages describe the work as the companies describe it, and this guide treats them that way.

Photography does much of the branding. Plants, barges, tugs, sorting halls and depots appear far more often than logos, and new facilities are announced with architects’ impressions long before they open; the trade weekly letsrecycle.com illustrated its 2022 report on Cory’s second Belvedere plant with one.

The other constant is the dated report. Viridor published its ESG report for the 2026 financial year in October 2026, and Cory published its 2025 annual and sustainability reports in June 2026, each with tonnages, electricity generated and progress on new plants. This guide uses such figures only as the companies or a dated source give them, and sets out what can be checked about each firm: who founded it, who owns it and how it presents its work.

Opera, ocean racing and a family company.

Paprec’s name travels furthest through sponsorship. French Wikipedia says the company has supported the Paris Opera since 2000 and has been the main patron of the Paris Opera Ballet since 2010, and the company says it sponsors an artist each year to express a view of recycling.

At sea, French Wikipedia says Paprec has backed ocean racing since 2004, first with the sailor Jean-Pierre Dick. With Crédit Mutuel Arkéa it ran the IMOCA Paprec Arkéa, and the Vendée Globe organisers reported in June 2025 that its skipper, Yoann Richomme, had finished second in the 2024 race. In the same report Paprec announced that it would lead a new IMOCA project for the 2028 Vendée Globe, after eight years of co-partnership with Arkéa; the boat was to be built at Multiplast in Brittany and launched in the first quarter of 2027. Since 2022 the company has also given its name to the Solitaire du Figaro Paprec and the Transat Paprec, French Wikipedia says.

The group has also faced the courts. In February 2025 a Paris judge approved a public-interest judicial agreement between Paprec and France’s national financial prosecutor’s office, settling proceedings that concerned public waste-treatment contracts and related matters between 2013 and 2022, BFM TV reported; the investigation had opened in 2020.

It has kept growing in France. A joint press release of 10 June 2026 said Paprec had bought a further 30.64 per cent of Pizzorno Environnement, the listed waste company based in Draguignan, from the Pizzorno-Devalle family on 9 June, after clearance from the French competition authority, taking its stake to about 50.64 per cent and making it the controlling shareholder; the release said a simplified public tender offer for the remaining shares would follow. The Petithuguenin family remains the majority owner, alongside financial investors and Bpifrance, the company says.

For a design guide, Paprec shows how a recycler built from dozens of acquired firms can keep their local names while one group name rides on opera programmes and racing sails. Compare Derichebourg, another Paris-based recycling group, and Veolia, whose predecessor, the Générale des Eaux, sold Paprec in 1994. For this guide we use a sorting green, a harbour blue and a pulp grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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